04 September 2012

Nadine Hutton: I, Joburg

I spend a lot of time wishing I were in South Africa. Yes, I know: Be Here Now. Screw it. I'll take South Africa, preferably Cape Town.

Except for today. Right now -- 5 September 2012 -- I'd rather be in Johannesburg for the opening of Nadine Hutton's first solo show, I, Joburg, at Room, 70 Juta Street, Braamfontein.

I, Joburg, exhibition catalogue.

I find it difficult to write about Nadine's work without gushing, on the one hand, and tripping over overwrought metaphors, on the other. So let me put it very simply. Her photography, film-making, and truly innovative use of social media add up to one of the most emotionally and intellectually challenging bodies of work that I've seen in years.

One of the things that I like the most about the work is the way it subverts, ignores, tramples on, and strokes the poor tired head of distinctions that have long seemed crucial to thinking about photography and film, especially the supposed dichotomies of documentary and art, public and private, personal and political.

I, Joburg catalogue. [Click on any image to see a larger version.]

The works on view in I, Joburg are just fragments of Nadine's output. But having seen the catalogue and the short film, "Memoirs of a Killarney Houseboy," that is a part of the show, I think it reflects some of the subject matter and much of the sensibility that she's developed in the course of her still relatively brief career.

In this show, the subjects are her city and her friends and collaborators. The sensibility, in the words of Maria Fidel Regueros, is "direct, quiet... schizophrenic and queer."

I, Joburg catalogue.

I take the show's title to mean two things. First, Johannesburg is Nadine's city. It's where she grew up and where she first worked in photography as a photojournalist, documenting its life in a more or less straightforward manner. In this show, however, she's created menacing documents (to paraphrase Regueros) -- photos that look like set designs for a movie version of Lauren Beukes' brilliant dystopian novel Zoo City. The photos are at once documents and art.

I, Joburg catalogue.

Second, I, Joburg refers to the camera that Nadine used to make the show's photo -- an iPhone. The use of the iPhone is more than incidental. Its small size, unobtrusiveness, and the fact that most people don't take it seriously facilitated Nadine's move from observer to participant, from a more distanced relationship to what is in front of her lens to a more intimate one. Public and private merge, separate, and come together once more.

I, Joburg catalogue.

In these photos and in "Memoirs of a Killarney Houseboy," the personal is the political. Their depictions of "spirituality, melancholy... absurdity, silence, friends and lovers, aspirations" are central to what Regueros calls Nadine's "ongoing disruption of benign heteronormativity." Queerness here is a sensibility, an identity, a way of being in the world; it's expressed with a matter-of-factness that destabilizes heterosexual norms more effectively than any overt display of sexuality ever could.

I, Joburg catalogue.

I, Joburg will be on view from September 5th to the 29th. Nadine leads an artist's walkabout on Saturday, September 22nd, at 11:00. Go, if you possibly can.

If you can't, check out Nadine's photography on her website, here, and her videos on both Vimeo and YouTube.

I mentioned that social media is a central part of Nadine's art. To get a sense of what she's up to, follow her on tumblr and Twitter.